Bryce not multi tasking?

Just a stupid question:
Can it be that Bryce stops rendering once I switch over to lets say youtube to watch a movie while it renders?
I have that every time.
I have to keep bryce in the foreground to finish the render or it stops and I have to press continue rendering.

Just a stupid question:
Can it be that Bryce stops rendering once I switch over to lets say youtube to watch a movie while it renders?
I have that every time.
I have to keep bryce in the foreground to finish the render or it stops and I have to press continue rendering.

That should not happen. I usually render in Normal on the hyperthreded i7 and keep the 15% of processor power to do a lot of other things, browsing and watching videos are among them. Even if I go up to high priority, Bryce takes as much as it can. Browsing and other tasks get lame. In the Task Manager (PC) under Processes, find Bryce and right click on it. In the pop-up, you can set the priority Windows assigns to it. I have set it at normal.

I think I know what you are talking about: the black line that shows where Bryce is at the moment with rendering vanishes when I do something else. Wait a bit until it has rendered that line of pixels and the black line will show up again. It may take quite some time, depending on render settings and objects in the scene.

I think I know what you are talking about: the black line that shows where Bryce is at the moment with rendering vanishes when I do something else. Wait a bit until it has rendered that line of pixels and the black line will show up again. It may take quite some time, depending on render settings and objects in the scene.

Yes, the line disappears and I waited 2 or three minutes, longer than necessary, and then I had to press resume render.
Once I forgot about the render but watched a video on youtube. When I came back to Bryce nothing was done.
Very strange.

I start a render and then go off and do other things on the computer (usually opening other apps/browsers etc).
At some point Bryce reverts back to the wireframe screen and I have to hit the 'resume render' button.

As Chohole says, it doesn't do it when you minimise Bryce, it only seems to happen when it's open full screen in the background.

I think I know what you are talking about: the black line that shows where Bryce is at the moment with rendering vanishes when I do something else. Wait a bit until it has rendered that line of pixels and the black line will show up again. It may take quite some time, depending on render settings and objects in the scene.

Yes, the line disappears and I waited 2 or three minutes, longer than necessary, and then I had to press resume render.
Once I forgot about the render but watched a video on youtube. When I came back to Bryce nothing was done.
Very strange.

Depending on settings the length of time to finish rendering one line of pixels before the black line appears can be much longer then 2-3 minutes. I've done a few renders here and there that took well over 24 hours to completely render. I didn't sit there and time how long it took for the line to reappear but in some instances it was easily above 10 minutes. Another factor is what exactly is in the line of pixels being registered. If for example it's in an area that is mostly or entirely clear blue sky the line will come back very quickly. In the same scen though you may have a highly detailed object with masks and high res textures and the line there would take much longer to render then the one that was just clear blue sky.

If it's not the render settings and the nature of the scene causing it then the next most likely scenario would be that your computer froze up. You should be able to check that by trying to open something, anything. If the computer is locked up you shouldn't be able to. If you can then it's likely your render settings are to high for your computer to manage in a timely fashion. Like for example I only have a dual core processor and as such I can't really handle high rpp settings without it taking a day or more, so I rarely put my rpp settings higher then 64.

Depending on settings the length of time to finish rendering one line of pixels before the black line appears can be much longer then 2-3 minutes. I've done a few renders here and there that took well over 24 hours to completely render.

I know, but I am not such a patient person.
If a render doesnt finish in 10 - 15 minutes I get nervous.
So, I never use those premium effects because it just takes too long for me.
So, calculating one line should not take so long.

Depending on settings the length of time to finish rendering one line of pixels before the black line appears can be much longer then 2-3 minutes. I've done a few renders here and there that took well over 24 hours to completely render.

I know, but I am not such a patient person.
If a render doesnt finish in 10 - 15 minutes I get nervous.
So, I never use those premium effects because it just takes too long for me.
So, calculating one line should not take so long.

Well it doesn't have to be just premium effects although if they aren't in play things shouldn't be that slow unless you have a really old system or are working with a scene heavily loaded down with objects and even then you'd still probably have to be running a really old machine for it to be that slow. It could maybe be a memory issue, have you made Bryce Large Address Aware yet? Also if you don't have much memory and are doing other things and/or have alot of TSR's running in your task bar that could be bogging you down as well.

If you don't know about Large Address Aware then there may be something about Bryce you don't know, that being that it can only access 2GB's of memory by default, even if you have a machine with 4,8,16 or 32GB's of memory. It's a limitation that is hard coded in Bryce and has to do with the fact that it's still just a 32 bit only program and 32 Bit was never designed with more the 4GB's of memory in mind. The only way to improve on how much memory Bryce can use is to make it LArge Address Aware which will let it use up to about 3.5GB's of memory if available.

So what that all really boils down to is that while Bryce can run in a multitasking environment it can't do it as well as more modern programs written for more modern hardware. So if patience isn't your thing then you're probably going to have to avoid other computer activities while rendering. Unfortunately the reality is that some things require that, like burning CD's or DVD's for example. There is a far greater chance a disk you are burning will fail to finish or finish with errors if you burn it while doing other CPU intensive activities on your computer at the same time.